Web Development + Follow

In 2018, Rachel Nabors made the point that browser diversity is similar to biological ecosystem diversity. There are literal advantages to more diversity. That article was before the Edge engines were shut, and now the big shakeups at Mozilla have the topic of browser diversity on people’s minds again. I really like Dave’s take on …

We’ve seen many events shift from in-person to online this year. That may have required a huge change to how you collect attendee registrations in the past, but with a paid Wufoo account and Zoom — along with a sprinkle of Zapier — it’s easier than ever to go virtual.

A very digestable guide from Geri Reid on building forms. Not the code, but the design and UX principles that should guide the code. Working on a design system for a bank has taught me a lot about forms. I’ve watched testing in our labs. I’ve worked alongside experts from specialist accessibility organisations. I’ve seen …

65,000 skins, they say. That’s extraordinary, especially considering how creative and well done many of them are. MySpace was an even bigger creative explosion of customization. What’s the next product that will inspire this kind of user ownership through theming? Allowing it isn’t terribly difficult. You allow people to write (or link up) their own …

Una Kravets and Vladimir Levin: … you can use another CSS property called content-visibility to apply the needed containment automatically. content-visibility ensures that you get the largest performance gains the browser can provide with minimal effort from you as a developer. The content-visibility property accepts several values, but auto is the one that provides immediate performance improvements. The perf benefits seems …

The Media Queries Level 4 Interaction Media Features — pointer, hover, any-pointer and any-hover — are meant to allow sites to implement different styles and functionality (either CSS-specific interactivity like :hover, or JavaScript behaviors, when queried using window.matchMedia), depending on the particular characteristics of a user’s input device.

A fancy experiential essay from the team at Readymag, which is a tool for building… fancy experiential essays, about fancy experiential essays: With all the technology addressing readability issues, it’s still design basics that distinguish a readable text from one that isn’t. Here are some simple rules we use ourselves when developing engaging texts and …

Rick Strahl: I can’t tell you how many times over the years I’ve implemented a custom ‘button’ like CSS implementation. Over the years I’ve used images, backgrounds, gradients, and opacity to effectively ‘highlight’ a control. All that works of course, but the problem with most of these approaches is that one way or the other …

I wanted to do a handwriting animation for calligraphy fonts — the kind where the words animate like they are being written by an invisible pen. Because calligraphy fonts have uneven stroke widths (they actually aren’t even strokes in terms of SVG), it was near impossible to do this sort of thing with typical path …

Last time there was a little flurry of activity around the concept of “View Source,” I did get the sense that not everyone was on the same page about what that even means. Jim Nielsen: First, when we talk about “View Source” what precisely are we talking about? I think this is an important point …

Changing specific characters can be a challenge in CSS. Often, we’re forced to implement our desired changes one-by-one in HTML, perhaps using the span element. But, in a few specific cases, a CSS-focused solution may still be possible. In this article, we’ll start by looking at some CSS-first approaches to changing characters, before considering a …

I don’t typically work with UI libraries because they can be cumbersome and hard to override, which can contribute to a bloated. However, Ant Design has recently gained some some of my affection because it’s easy to use, has extensible defaults, and features a delicate design. Nuxt and Ant Design work well together, in part …

As someone who loves creating CSS animations, one of the more powerful tools I use is perspective. While the perspective property is not capable of 3D effects all by itself (since basic shapes can’t have depth), you can use the transform property to move and rotate objects in a 3D space (with the X, Y, …

Everybody is talking about AVIF today because of Jake’s blog post. As the say, I was today years old when I learned AVIF was a thing. But thanks to web technology being ahead of the game for once, we can already take advantage of it.

Many development environments require running things in a terminal window. npm run start, or whatever. I know my biggest project requires me to be running a big fancy Docker-based thing in one terminal, Ruby on Rails in another, and webpack in another. I’ve worked on other projects that require multiple terminal windows as well, and …

Jetpack 8.9 shipped on September 1 and it shows why the plugin continues to be the premier way to take a WordPress site from good to holy smokes! Several new features are packed into the release, but a few really stand out.

There are many different approaches to menus on websites. Some menus are persistent, always in view and display all the options. Other menus are hidden by design and need to be opened to view the options. And there are even additional approaches on how hidden menus reveal their menu items. Some fly out and overlap …

This is a neat page that compares a ton of different libraries with web components. One of the things I learned after posting “A Bit on Web Components Libraries” is that the web platform APIs were designed for libraries to be built around them. Interesting, right? This page makes a counter component. By extending HTMLElement …

We’re living through a weird era where there are tons of JavaScript libraries that were meant to be used as <script> tags that expose available globals. AND there are tons of JavaScript libraries that are meant to be used through module loaders. AND there are tons of JavaScript libraries that assume you will use them …

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of media queries? Maybe something in a CSS file that looks like this: CSS media queries are a core ingredient in any responsive design. They’re a great way to apply different styles to different contexts, whether it’s based on viewport size, motion preference, preferred …

I go into all this in The “Inside” Problem. The gist: you want an edge-to-edge container, but the content inside to have a limited width. I think there is absolutely no problem using a nested element inside, but it’s also fun to look at the possibilities of making that work on a single element.

Beyond using media queries and modern CSS layouts, like flexbox and grid, to create responsive websites, there are certain overlooked things we can do well to make responsive sites. In this article, we’ll dig into a number tools (revolving around HTML and CSS) we have at the ready, from responsive images to relatively new CSS …

Speaking of number scrubbing (i.e. adding mouse UX to number inputs), you can also add better keyboard commands to number inputs. Kilian Valkhof explains how he added up and down arrows to a number input, as well as modifier keys to change how much the keys increment the value, like Emmet does. This would make …

Whenever I think of stroked text on the web I think: nope. There is -webkit-text-stroke in CSS for it, but it places that stroke in the middle of the vector outline of the characters, absolutely ensuring that the character doesn’t look right. Just look at this in Chrome or Safari. Gross. If you’re going to …

There are different ways to work with icons, but the best solution always includes SVG, whether it’s implemented inline or linked up as an image file. That’s because they’re “drawn” in code, making them flexible, adaptable, and scalable in any context. But when working with SVG, there’s always the chance that they contain a lot …

The Jamstack, a modern approach to building websites and apps, delivers better performance, higher security, lower cost of scaling, and a better developer experience. But how popular is it among developers worldwide, and what do they love and hate about it?

Una Kravetz digs into how Chrome now allows you to declare CSS custom properties directly from CSS with more information than just a string.

CSS-Tricks has this pretty cool way of styling hovered links. By default, the text is a fairly common blue. But hover of the links, and they’re filled with a linear gradient.

CSS Grid is a collection of properties designed to make layout easier than it’s ever been. Like anything, there’s a bit of a learning curve, but Grid is honestly fun to work with once you get the hang of it. One area where it shines is dealing with headers and footers. With a little adjustment …

There are a number of these desktop apps where the goal is showing your site at different dimensions all at the same time. So you can, for example, be writing CSS and making sure it’s working across all the viewports in a single glance. They are all very similar. For example, they do “event mirroring” …